From 3th Aug 1994: First announcement of Tela

a new freely usable numerical computing environment

Properties:

Supports arbitrary dimensional arrays (currently the rank must be less
than five though).

Is generally 2-4 times faster than Matlab, the extremeties encountered so
far are 0.9-11.

Has integer, real and complex arrays and scalars.

Uses HDF format as native save/load format.

Can also read/write Matlab binary files and some ASCII files.

No built-in graphics, but uses Kenny Toh's PlotMTV program for plotting.
Graphic is better than in Matlab3.5 but worse than in 4.0.

Easily extensible in a variety of ways, all of which are not fully
functional in this first public release.

A program exists for translating Matlab code to Tela. The translation is
not perfect, but must be manually augmented later.

Others for you to find out ...

What to do with it

If you have a system that is not included in the binary distributions, you
should consider building it yourself from the sources and sending the image
to ftp.funet.fi. Installing Tela from scratch is not difficult, but takes
some time.